Search form

Video Library

Since 2002 Perimeter Institute has been recording seminars, conference talks, and public outreach events using video cameras installed in our lecture theatres. Perimeter now has 7 formal presentation spaces for its many scientific conferences, seminars, workshops and educational outreach activities, all with advanced audio-visual technical capabilities. Recordings of events in these areas are all available On-Demand from this Video Library and on Perimeter Institute Recorded Seminar Archive (PIRSA). PIRSA is a permanent, free, searchable, and citable archive of recorded seminars from relevant bodies in physics. This resource has been partially modelled after Cornell University's arXiv.org.

I will introduce Kitaev's suface codes as a block quantum
error-correcting code. Recovery procedures will be described in the
case of imperfect syndrome measurements. More might be covered if
time permits.

The entanglement entropy between quantum fields inside and outside a black hole horizon is a promising candidate for the microscopic origin of black hole entropy. I will explain the motivation behind this interpretation of black hole entropy, and why it requires quantum gravity. I will then apply these ideas to loop quantum gravity and show how to compute the entanglement entropy of spin network states. The result of this calculation agrees asymptotically with results from the isolated horizon framework, and I will give the reason for this agreement.

I will discuss recent results in Supersymmetric Large Extra Dimensions (SLED), a scenario which shows promise towards solving both the hierarchy and the cosmological constant problems. One of the issues which arises in this programme is a direct result of the need to use

In the sixties, Roger Penrose came up with a radical new idea for a quantum geometry which would be entirely background independent, combinatorial, discrete (countable number of degrees of freedom), and involve only integers and fractions, not complex or real numbers. The basic structures are spin-networks. One reason we might believe that space or space-time might be discrete is that current physique tells us that matter is discrete and that matter and geometry are related through gravity.

The study of particle-like excitations of quantum gravitational fields in loop quantum gravity is extended to the case of four valent graphs and the corresponding natural evolution moves based on the dual Pachner moves. This makes the results applicable to spin foam models. We find that some braids propagate on the networks and they can interact with each other, by joining and splitting. The chirality of the braid states determines the motion and the interactions, in that left handed states only propagate to the left, and vise versa.

In the late 80s it became clear through notable work by Witten and others that there is a deep connection between (2+1) gravity and Chern-Simons theory making it possible to quantize. In the case where the cosmological constant is negative, spacetime has a boundary and classically there are black holes. We will study the features of this theory as an arena for seeing the simple realization of the Holographic Principle and the duality between quantum gravity theories in asymptotically Anti-deSitter space and conformal field theories.